Please visit the California Revealed website to see the most complete and up-to-date version of this object: https://repository.californiarevealed.org/node/427979.

This photograph album memorializes the school-age life of a young Japanese-American woman in California named Shizuko "Skeets" Kayashima, mostly in the years immediately preceding the internment period, but with a few internment-related photographs. The album captures three images of Kayashima's grammar school in Terra Bella in 1936 and numerous shots of her life at Porterville Union High School beginning in 1938. There are several photographs inscribed to Kayashima, along with multiple portraits of her mounted in the album. There are also a few dozen photographs, both individual and group shots, featuring identified Japanese Americans and other fellow students and friends of Kayashima's. The album also includes pictures of school groups on field trips, at French Camp, in a school production of The Magic Beanstalk, and more. Several photographs from the summer of 1941 show Kayashima and her fellow students at their high school graduation. The largest photograph in the album features the Southern District Young Woman's Buddhist Association's 4th Annual Play Day on August 10, 1941. The final leaves of the album contain about a dozen professional portraits. Toward the end of the album, two photographs show Kayashima's friends in Denson, Arkansas, the location of the Jerome War Relocation Center. The first, featuring Funye Tahara, is inscribed to Kayashima in 1943. The second, inscribed to Kayashima using her nickname "Skeets," shows a young Japanese-American soldier named Ross Iwanaga at Denson, in front of a sparse background. He is shown wearing a shirt for Camp Wolters, an American military base located near Mineral Wells, Texas. Iwanaga is listed as an internee at Jerome in the Christmas Eve, 1942 issue of Communique, the internment camp newsletter. Shortly after graduating from high school, Shizuko "Skeets" Kayashima was interned at the Poston War Relocation Center. While there, she met her future husband, fellow internee George K. Hasegawa, the couple married in Detroit in 1944. After Hasegawa served in the U.S. Army from 1944 to 1946, the couple settled in St. Louis.

plus-circle Add Review

comment

Reviews